East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's by Sidney Weissman Page B

often. Just sometimes. We eat something like it, noodles, we call it luckshin. We eat wide noodles like when you eat spaghetti. We eat fine noodles when we put it in soup.”
    Yussie’s mother had been nodding her head. “And the sauce when you eat the noodle, you mama, she make it like me?”
    “Well,” I said. “When she makes it with sauce, she buys it in the grocery store.”
    “In the grocery store?” she had said perplexed. “What can you buy in the grocery store?” Her shoulders had gone up in a huge shrug.
    “Del Monte tomato sauce,” I had replied. “In the little cans. My mother uses that.”
    “She use the can, what she buy in the store?” Yussie’s mother said in wonderment. “I make my sauce, that what make the spaghetti, the sauce.” She had become silent for a moment then she had asked, “This Del Monte, they are Italian?”
    “I don’t know,” I had replied. “They put all kinds of things in cans, fruits, vegetables, fish, tomato herring, things like that.”
    Yussie’s mother’s head had gone back and forth in a puzzled motion and she had said, “We no buy things like that. Maybe tonno. You like tonno?”
    “Tuna?” I had asked and she had nodded. “No, we don’t eat that. We buy salmon in cans. Bumble Bee.”
    His mother had shrugged once more, picked up the plate I had just finished and gone to the sink. Yussie had been watching me, an amused grin on his face. I had smiled at him and he had whispered to me, “I was lucky. Your mother didn’t put me through that. Lucky she thought I was Jewish. Maybe what you ought to do is become Italian.”
    We had both laughed at that. Yussie’s mother had turned to stare at us then returned to her work at the sink. “You want the fruit?” she had asked the both of us over her shoulder.
    “No, thanks,” I had replied. As it was I had been embarrassed to eat in a stranger’s house. And strange food at that.
    We had gone back to studying, Yussie and I. Now and then his mother had stopped to listen and look at us. Once she had said, “You smart, you two. Be smart. You be something good, you understand?”
    Once, only once, his father had come home when I had been there. Seated in the kitchen, Yussie’s father had turned to both us, listened to our studyings, our replies. He had said something in Italian to his wife and she had replied in a quick rush of unintelligible sound.
    Although I had tried to learn Italian, I hadn’t understood it at all, not a word. I had envied Yussie and his quick grasp of foreign languages, I had yearned to be able to do what he did.
    “You no understand?” Yussie’s father had said to me.
    “Italian? No,” I had replied.
    “Why not? You smart, no? Why you no understand?”
    “I never learned,” I had said to him.
    “What you learn now, what I hear you say, that make you smart?” he had asked. I had not replied, I sensed it was a rhetorical question. “No,” he had said. “What make you smart is what you do with what you learn. But don’t get so smart, you forget you family. I see it happen. That’s no good, no good. Family, that’s what count. You understand? You, Joey’s friend,” he had said to me, “you get so smart you forget you family?”
    I hadn’t known what to say. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I finally had said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”
    “You think about it,” Yussie’s father had said. “Think about it good. You no hurt you family. Study, learn, be somebody, that’s good, but no leave the family, that’s no good. Understand?”
    Later I had asked Yussie what his father and mother had said in Italian. Yussie had laughed. “He asked if you were the smart one, the one with the brains. And my mother had told him, yes, then she told him not speak in Italian, you didn’t understand, it wasn’t nice.”
    That had been some time ago and now I was walking into Yussie’s world, still an alien world to me, the pork stores, the bakeries, the grocery